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FILE TRADING APPLICATION By John Freeman
I’m going to start with the standard warnings: “don’t download stuff you’re not supposed to” and “don’t brag about it if you do.” “Violation of copyright law is a serious offense, and if you’re not careful you could end up in serious trouble.” You’ve heard it all before, and if you’re anything like most people, you ignored every word you heard.
The death of Napster was supposed to be the beginning of the end for the file-sharing movement, but as most people have figured out by now, that turned out to be a rather optimistic forecast. Far from having crushed MP3 trading on the Net, it is becoming obvious that the Napster shutdown has energized file sharing, sending millions of people to programs like iMesh, Music City and Audiogalaxy.
Most Napster users, after trying to download stuff off the old program without much success have shrugged their shoulders and moved on to new alternatives, taking their MP3 collections with them. One of the most popular of the new programs is Audiogalaxy, run by a company based ,appropriately enough, in Austin Texas, a city where music is a way of life, and life is good.
It’s a set of seriously sick features that are attracting all the traffic. The buzz is, as file sharing programs go, Audiogalaxy is much better than Napster ever was. Include me among the fans – with a few fairly serious reservations worth noting, which you’ll probably want to pay attention to.
The Audiogalaxy search interface.
I had heard a lot of good things about Audiogalaxy from various sources before I sat down to test the program, so I was expecting to be pleasantly surprised, and at worst, confronted by something that looked, smelled and acted pretty much like a slightly inferior version of Napster.
A Really, Really Pleasant Surprise
It turns out the sources I had been listening to were right. After about an hour of casual experimentation with Audiogalaxy I was awestruck. I think my mouth must have been hanging open as I sat there, because I started to choke.
Not only is Audiogalaxy a nicer ride than Napster, it’s smarter, it’s faster and it’s a lot better looking. The program has some flaws, but that’s only to be expected. In many ways, it is a system which looks a lot like the future of file sharing…
Web Based Interface
The key to Audiogalaxy’s success is a web-based interface, which, although it may slow you down at peak traffic hours, makes Audiogalaxy more effective than Napster ever was. After a few minutes fooling around with the system, you’ll probably reach the same conclusion as I did: Napster (well the old Napster, anyway) is for itty bitties who want to play with MP3 files. Audiogalaxy is for people who want to find what they are looking for, and have a lot of fun in the process. In other words, people who love music.
Smarter than Your Average Web Site
Audiogalaxy works as well as it does because it pays full attention to what you are looking for (unlike some web sites I could mention) and keeps tabs on everything, storing that information in a central database. This means Audiogalaxy is able to organize information about the files moving across its network with mindboggling efficiency. Which makes finding the stuff you’re looking for amazingly easy.
Let’s say you’re searching for a relatively hard to find song – like Mott the Hoople’s cover of Lou Reed’s melancholy classic “Sweet Jane” A great cover, but difficult to find using Napster, because not that many people know about it.
Tell it to find “Sweet Jane” and Audiogalaxy will hunt track the file like a detective. If it finds the file sitting on somebody’s hard drive on it’s first try – Audiogalaxy will download it – and if not it – get this, it remembers what you’re looking for and keeps running the search continuously whenever you’re online and connected to the system. Sorta like Tivo. It’s a feature that’s tweaked to perfection.
This means if you’re trying to build up your MP3 collection, you’re not going to have to do very much work at all. Just spend a few minutes coming up with a master list of tracks for Audiogalaxy to work from and you’re done. Audiogalaxy will take care of the tedious aspects of searching for you. Leave the program to its own devices for a few hours and you’ll more likely than not return to a fresh batch of MP3s awaiting your attention.
Interrupted Transfers
Interupted transfers – a fact of life for anybody who downloads large files on the Net – are handled in exactly the same way, with equally satisfying results. Again, you don’t have to remember to tell Audiogalaxy to do a thing. Audiogalaxy simply takes note of the fact a transfer has been interupted, and completes the transfer when another version of the file becomes available. Many file-sharing programs have this feature, but Audiogalaxy does a particularly good job.
Web Based Management
If you’re a music fan with eclectic tastes – which we all are – you’ll probably also appreciate the web based file management system Audiogalaxy uses to help you keep your MP3 collection organized. Log into your Audiogalaxy account and you’ll be able to administer to and control your account from anywhere on the planet where you have access to a Net connection and a set of speakers.
Organize Your MP3 Collection
Instead of just dumping all of your MP3s into a folder and leaving it up to you to go through and organize things, Audiogalaxy automatically classifies the songs in your shared files folder by genre, dumping them into subcategories – like let’s say: Jam bands, or Southern Rock or Hip Hop or Electronica. A pretty neat trick, although closet rock critics are likely to argue with some of the system’s classifications.
You can still do anything you ordinarily would do on your own using a MP3 organizer like WinAmp or MusicMatch: set up your own folders, move files around, delete files, and so on. But the web-based system is there waiting for you, should you choose to use it. And more often than not, you’ll find it helpful.
A Central Directory for Shares
AudioGalaxy is also a killer tool for finding and discovering new music. Instead of using the search function to look for downloads, (a la Napster) you can also browse the site’s central directory, which organizes all of the files available on the Audiogalaxy network by genre and artist.
It’s all well-organized and well thought out and hopelessly clever. Not to mention very educational. You can browse throughout the directory genre by genre, moving up and down the ladder through broadly based categories like alternative rock and hip hop and back again to through specialty classifications like Memphis Soul and Motown blues. Click on an artist and you’ll get a list of every song available by that performer – including a complete list of tracks that people have looked for in the past but which aren’t currently available. You’ll also be able to see how many copies of each file are available for download – revealing information, to say the least.
Just one Piddling Little Detail…
Sound to good to be true? If past experience has taught us anything about the Net (and it damn well should have by now) , it’s that the same rules apply online as do in real life. In this case: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And, of course, that’s the case here. There are very real dangers involved in using this kind of system, which is the real reason none of the other file-sharing programs currently on the market use this technology.
For one thing, Audiogalaxy’s databases contain a permanent record of everything you’ve downloaded using the program and everything you’ve allowed others to upload. That’s a fact you may well want to ponder: especially if you are that – um – rare sort of person who downloads things they’re technically not supposed to every once and awhile. My theory (and this is only another of my cute little personal theories) is that Audiogalaxy is hoping to strike a deal with one of the big players in the recording industry sooner rather than later. And probably a lot sooner than that. Otherwise, setting up a central directory based on a vulnerable system like this makes no sense at all. In fact, it would be suicidal. And on the face of it, it seems unlikely that a company smart enough to build a system this good is suicidal…
Audiogalaxy has already started voluntarily screening and blocking copyrighted material – just like Napster. Their effort is just getting underway, so for the time being anyway, there’s still plenty of downloading going on.
There is another issue involved here you may to think about. That issue involves your privacy. Because Audiogalaxy tracks everything that happens on its networks: the titles users search for, the files they download, the things you do with your collection (even the files you delete after listening to them a few times) those databases necessarily contain a lot of information about you.
And that’s information you may not want people to have access to. The implications for your privacy, yet again, are obviously not necessarily too good. The abysmal track record of the technology industry is this area is a major reason talk of tough new privacy laws keeps building on Capital Hill. And a reason groups like the Privacy Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pretty busy these days.
On the other hand, it’s easy to feel pessimistic. There’s plenty of evidence that the average Net could care less about handing over their personal data to the tech industry, if what they get in return is free or works fairly well.
And despite the constant attention this topic has gotten in the press, many users remain unaware that the problem exists at all. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this: on the one hand, the idea bothers me in my gut. On the other hand, I love this system and I love what it does for me.
Is this a fair trade? I wonder.
